Entries from July 2017

Is Georgia doling out too many tax breaks?
You could certainly make that argument.
In this year’s General Assembly session, lawmakers passed 10 bills granting various forms of tax breaks and exemptions that totaled nearly half a billion dollars: $483 million over the next five years, by one estimate. Gov. Nathan Deal signed them all into law.
The people receiving the tax breaks are primarily Georgia’s wealthiest citizens. One of the bills passed this year, for example, grants a sales tax exemption for repairs or renovations of luxury yachts that cost at least $500,000.
There’s also a tax break for the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, tax credits for financiers who invest in rural businesses, and a reduction in the corporate net worth tax.
Who’s not getting these tax breaks? People like you and me. We’re the ones who will be expected to make up the $483 million in lost revenues that result from all the tax breaks the Legislature handed out.
In the same session where they OK’d a tax exemption for luxury yachts, legislators passed another bill that increased the fees you pay for boat registrations. In other words, a tax break for yacht owners, but a higher registration fee for people who take their outboards to Lake Lanier.
Legislators declined to renew another tax break that for years provided benefits to millions of middle-income Georgians: the sales tax holiday during the summer for buying personal computers and back-to-school supplies. That tax break was taken away.
That’s typically the philosophy of the General Assembly: tax breaks for the favored few, but not for the many.
There are some legislators from both sides of the partisan aisle who criticize these tax giveaways, but most are only too happy to keep granting them.
“My experience has been that most folks are opposed to all of them, except for the one they’re for,” observed Sen. Jack Hill (R-Reidsville).
But finally, there is at least one study committee that is taking a look at the matter.
The Special Tax Exemption Senate Study Committee held the first of several hearings last week, and some of the committee members actually suggested that it may be time to start reining in these tax breaks.
Sen. John Albers (R-Roswell), who chairs the committee, said the panel might very well look at “those (tax breaks) that are actually not providing the value they were originally intended to. We want to look at those and see if it makes sense in the future to sunset those to make sure we’re spending each and every tax dollar as wisely as we can.”
“I am more interested in lowering everyone’s income taxes and not having credits be so prevalent in Georgia,” said Sen. Hunter Hill (R-Atlanta), who’s running for governor next year.
Albers also wants the study committee to develop a process for evaluating the potential payback of proposed tax breaks before lawmakers take the final vote on them, so that the unproductive ones aren’t passed in the first place.
That would be a first for Georgia, where tax breaks have long been enacted with no followup evaluation to determine whether they actually accomplish their purpose.
Chaaron Pearson of Pew Charitable Trusts, which studies the impact of tax breaks nationwide, told the study committee that tax incentives for economic development purposes cost state and local governments $40 billion a year in foregone revenues.
Georgia is one of 23 states “that lacks a well-designed evaluation plan” for these tax breaks, Pearson said.
In other words, legislators pass tax breaks but the revenue department doesn’t try to determine whether these exemptions are really creating jobs or generating economic development. Lawmakers are just flying blind.
It could be that some of the tax breaks passed in recent years have really been productive.
An oft-cited example is the tax legislation that is credited with luring TV and movie production companies to the state.
Under the current system, however, there’s little way of knowing whether tax breaks really work or not.
I wish the study committee all the luck in the world as it undertakes this Herculean task.
It would be great to see lawmakers demonstrate some common sense on the issue of tax breaks – but don’t hold your breath.
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Tom Crawford is editor of The Georgia Report, an internet news service at gareport.com that reports on state government and politics. He can be reached at tcrawford@gareport.com.

It’s difficult to believe when you look around booming northeast Georgia, but not everywhere in the country is growing.
A large swath of the American Midwest, from northern Texas up into the Dakotas, is seeing depopulation as young people leave rural communities and move into urban areas where there are more job opportunities.
Farm consolidations and the mechanization of agricultural production has taken a toll on rural Midwestern counties.
That is just one of many trends reshaping the nation. It’s always been this way. America has long been noted for its dynamic shifts, starting with the westward migrations from the East Coast in the 1800s. The Great Plains of that era were places of opportunity for homesteaders and the self-reliant.
Another great movement of people came in the mid-1900s when people moved to find work during the Great Depression and during World War II. Around 44 percent of the nation’s population was rural in 1930; that dropped to 36 percent by 1950 and 30 percent by 1960.
Today, the nation’s rural population has fallen just below 20 percent.
That population shift will have huge ramifications for our nation’s political cultural fabric.
Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been defined by suburbanization. That was accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s as “white flight” from urban cities led to massive suburban growth. At the time, America’s urban areas were a wasteland of poverty, crime, pollution and decay.
Job opportunities — both white-collar and blue-collar — moved from cities to the suburbs.
Now, that pattern seems to be reversing as large companies are abandoning their suburban campuses to move back into urban environments.
That trend is due to the demand for labor, specifically high-tech labor that is found among younger workers who would rather live in urban areas than the suburbs.
This trend has large implications for the nation’s political and social climate. Urban political and cultural values are different than rural mores — more liberal politically and socially.
We saw some of that trend in the 2016 elections as Donald Trump dominated the rural vote while the more liberal Hillary Clinton took most urban areas.
Jobs are one of the key reasons for this trend, but there are other urban draws, too.
Urban areas tend to have better health care available than rural areas and they offer more cultural and social outlets that most rural communities.
The downsides are obvious, too. Crime, traffic congestion and noise are all problems found in many urban communities.
A second trend is the impact of immigrants and minorities in the nation. Once dismissed as inconsequential, the growth of Asian and Hispanic populations is having a profound impact on the nation’s culture and economy, if not its political system.
That is one reason immigration has become such a hot-button issue in the past decade; these populations are reaching a critical mass that for some threatens the status quo power structure.
A third trend in this population shift is regional.
Manufacturing has slowly been moving from the North to the South since 1960. The lack of aggressive labor unions and lower wages in the South began that trend, but it has accelerated as the South has improved its transportation infrastructure and educational opportunities.
That movement, however, has put parts of the North — Detroit is one example — into a downward spiral.
Despite the growth of many urban areas, those that have been hit with a huge loss of manufacturing have yet to recover and benefit from urban renewal.
One thing that has not changed very much over the years is the cultural and political influence found in both East and West coast cities.
New York and Washington D.C. on the East Coast have long dominated the nation’s economic, media and political atmosphere while the West Coast cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle dominate the nation’s entertainment, cultural and high-tech worlds.
But nothing about the nation is static. What is true today may be different tomorrow.
Economic trends, technological changes and cultural values all wax and wane over time.
What was true 50 years ago is often very different today.
This dynamism is what makes the U.S. unique and is the source of its strength. But it’s not without controversy and problems: What should we do about the small towns that are dying in the Midwest? How do we help people move from areas where jobs are being lost to areas where jobs are available?
How do we adjust psychologically as a nation to the large cultural changes taking place in our communities?
These are fundamental questions that in many ways underlie the sharp political issues of our time.
Health care, immigration and tax reform are all affected by these unsettled and changing population trends.
We live in an era of tremendous change from a variety of conflicting forces.
And despite what politicians on both sides of the aisle claim, there are no easy or quick solutions to the problems these changes create.
—
Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.

Surely, it’s a product of our social media-dominated times, but the notion that a parole hearing would have been the most talked about topic on the internet Thursday would normally have seemed silly.
Except, we were talking about the parole hearing of O.J. Simpson. Simpson, who gained fame first as a Hall of Fame running back, then as an actor and then as an alleged double murderer, was granted parole last week after serving a minimum nine years of a 33-year sentence for an armed robbery and kidnapping conviction stemming from a September 2007 incident at a Las Vegas hotel.
The unanimous decision by the Nevada Board of Parole came just shy of 22 years after Simpson was acquitted in the brutal stabbing deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman. A large majority of Americans believe Simpson got away with double murder and many of them were angered that he will soon walk free again.
And as much as it pains me to say so, he should.
I was only 6 years old when Simpson’s murder trial occurred. I faintly remember talk of the Bronco chase and barely recall the verdict. My parents were furious at his acquittal, while some of my extended family, despite an overwhelming amount of physical and circumstantial evidence, remained convinced he had either been framed by a corrupt Los Angeles Police Department or that he should have been acquitted based on a gross mishandling of the physical evidence.
While I don’t remember the day-to-day drama of the case as it happened, I’ve read a lot about it over the years and watched dozens of documentaries about it.
Along with millions of other Americans, the case has always fascinated me. It says so much about our attitudes toward and issues with race, class, police, the legal system, domestic violence, celebrity, pop culture, etc, all of which still ring true today.
The best, most comprehensive examination of the case I’ve seen is Ezra Edelman’s Oscar-winning, five-part documentary “O.J.: Made in America,” which originally aired last summer on ESPN.
The FX drama, “The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” which focused on the prosecution and defense teams in the case, was also well done, but Edelman gave us one of the great documentaries of all time, which chronicles everything from O.J.’s time as the star running back at USC to his 2007 conviction on the armed robbery and kidnapping charges.
The most important part is the second one, in which Edelman explores the LAPD’s history of systemic racism toward black Americans that eventually helped create the environment for the double murder trial to be framed around race and racial injustice.
The murder victims became secondary cast members as Simpson’s star-studded defense team shifted the focus to the sloppy gathering of evidence, framing that as evidence itself of a sweeping conspiracy to frame a black man of murder. Most damning was F. Lee Bailey’s cross-examination of lead detective Mark Fuhrmann who, in recordings played in the trial, seemed to delight in his egregious casual use of the N-word.
Combine that with prosecutor Christopher Darden’s insistence that O.J. try on the pair of gloves (one of the great legal blunders in history) and Johnnie Cochran’s famous “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” line, and it was more than enough to sway the opinions of many African-Americans, especially those in Los Angeles, who had an understandable distrust of police and the justice system.
Whether justified or not, Simpson became a civil rights martyr of sorts and to many black Americans his acquittal symbolized a victory against a corrupt, racist system.
There are many moments in Edleman’s masterpiece that stood out to me, but there are two especially that almost perfectly sum up the case.
In one, juror Carrie Bess is asked if there were jurors who voted to acquit Simpson as payback for the acquittal of LAPD officers in the savage beating of Rodney King.
She speculates “90 percent” of the jurors felt that way and said she was one of them. Asked if she thought that was right, she raises her hands as if to shrug.
In the other, as footage of O.J.’s return home following his acquittal plays, Mark Whitlock, pastor of Christ Our Redeemer AME Church provides this insight: “It wasn’t a victory for black people suffering from racial injustice. It was a victory for a rich guy named O.J. Simpson and I was troubled by it.”
In a brilliant piece in the “Atlantic” in last October, Ta-Nehisi Coates underscored this point while also bringing attention, as Edelman did, to the fact that Simpson had shied away from civil rights issues in the ‘60s while other prominent black athletes embraced their platforms.
“I did not understand the ties that united Simpson and the black community,” Coates wrote. “When O. J. Simpson ran from justice, returned to it, was tried for murder, and eluded justice again, it was the most shocking statement of pure equality since the civil rights movement. Simpson had killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. I suspected that then, and I am sure of it now.
“But he’d gotten away with it — in much the same way that white people had killed black men and women for centuries and gotten away with it.”
The reality is for all the good it does, the justice system also has failed way too many people. Too many people have been wrongfully convicted based on faulty evidence, while others who were guilty have escaped justice, in many cases because of money and influence. And many times, those miscarriages of justice have been racially-based.
Many Americans, particularly white Americans, continue to harbor strong resentment of O.J. Simpson, who was eventually found liable for the deaths of his ex-wife and Goldman in a 1997 civil trial.
And it seemed like poetic, karmic justice when he was convicted on the armed robbery and kidnapping charges.
Was the maximum 33-year sentence handed down by the judge in the case justified, given Simpson’s involvement in the crime? Maybe, maybe not, but it didn’t matter to many people. O.J. was where he belonged, and the judge seemed determined to make sure that happened. But true justice and the legal system don’t always align, and trying to operate a system based on feelings of karma is a slippery slope we should refrain from.
Based on the facts at hand, regardless of your opinion on the double murder and the circus of a trial that followed it, it appears the parole board got it right in this case.
Simpson is, in my opinion, a detestable human being, and though he did apologize for his actions at his parole hearing, he predictably sought to deflect blame for the incident that led to his conviction.
But whether or not he has remorse for his actions is not considered relevant in Nevada parole cases.
Simpson was found to be discipline-free in prison, to have stable release plans, family and community support and no prior convictions.
And no matter how terrible and smug he may sounded when he said with a straight face he had lived a “conflict-free” life, you have to put that aside and recognize the system worked here.
Anytime that happens is good.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
We need a system that works for everyone, not one that works for only a few. We never know if our own lives might depend on it someday.
—
Scott Thompson is editor of the Barrow News-Journal. He can be reached at sthompson@barrownewsjournal.com.

A man was arrested by Winder Police on Wednesday after surveillance video showed him losing control of his car while purposely spinning it around in a parking lot and hitting a package store.
Timothy Bray turned himself into police Wednesday on warrants of criminal trespass and reckless driving. According to a news release, Wray's white Chevy Aveo was captured on camera just after 7:30 p.m. Sunday attempting to "do donuts" in the parking lot of the Royal Blue package store at 321 North Broad St. Wray lost control of the vehicle and struck the building and tree before fleeing the scene.
A video of the incident was posted to the police department's Facebook page Tuesday and Wray was identified as the suspect.
He turned himself in Wednesday and was issued a $2,606 bond. His court date is scheduled later this year.

The Barrow County Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday to maintain the school millage rate at 18.5 mills, the rate it has been since 2007.
The millage rate will be an increase in taxes for about 24,350 property owners in the county whose property was reappraised during 2016.
For other property owners, taxes should remain about the same. One mill amounts to $1 per $1,000 of assessed property value.
A homeowner levied a 1 mill tax on a property assessed at $200,000 would pay $200 in taxes.
The board held three public hearings on the millage rate because it is higher than the rollback rate.
The rollback millage rate, which would have produced about the same property tax revenue as the previous year, was 17.146 mills. The net tax digest for schools was $1.89 billion, an increase of about 9.8 percent.
The school district budget for FY 2018 anticipates about $33 million in local taxes and about 78.2 million in state funds. The school district projects about $4.7 million more in revenue for 2018 and the FY 2017.
The budget plans to use about $3.6 million in reserve funds. A reserve fund of about $6 million is projected for June 30, 2018.
Seven new positions are included for support staff and administrators for the new Winder Elementary School. A math specialist at the system level and 8.5 new teaching positions also are included.
The general fund budget is about $118.9 million, about $6.7 million more than the FY 2017 budget.
Other funds, including capital expenditures and debt service, are about $40.4 million.
For more coverage of Tuesday's meeting, see the July 26 issue of the Barrow News-Journal.

The Barrow County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved Tuesday the millage rate for the 2017 digest, which included “rollbacks” for the incorporated and unincorporated portions of the county.
The millage rate for the incorporated portions will be 10.466 and the rate for the unincorporated portions will be 8.366, rolled back from 13.647. Both the incorporated and unincorporated rates include a 3.201-mill rollback from sales tax, and the unincorporated rate includes a 2.11-mill insurance premium rollback. The rollbacks are designed to offset increases in the 2017 tax digest due to inflationary growth. The millage rate is expected to generate a little less than $17 million, which county manager Mike Renshaw has said would fund the county’s Fiscal Year 2018 budget. The school district and fire district millage rates will remain the same at 18.5 mills and 2.28 mills, respectively.

Use change request
denied for property near Ga. 316
Also Tuesday, commissioners denied a request by Ronnie Gasaway to remove a special use for commercial development from property he owns at 1506 Farmington Way, 1525 Farmington Way and 778 Chancey Circle, between Ga. 316 and Haymon Morris Road in Winder.
The original 45-acre property was rezoned in 2008 with a master planned development special use, and the proposed project at the time included a mix of apartments (54 percent), commercial development (20 percent), open space (20 percent) and streets (6 percent). Parts of the property were sold off in 2011 and 2013 and became the Farmington Hills apartment complex. Since then, Gasaway has decided against commercial development on the property and instead sought to subdivide the remaining 28.4 acres to include a 16-acre tract with 180 apartments, leaving 12.4 acres open.
See the full story in the July 26 issue of the Barrow News-Journal.

WINDER - Thomas Calvin Wall Jr., 70, passed away Wednesday, July 19 2017. He was a Vietnam Veteran serving in the United States Navy. Tommy was preceded in death by his parents, Thomas Calvin and Lola Baskin Wall; a sister and brother-in-law, Patricia and Ludger Lanthier and nephews, Trip and Chris Lanthier. Survivors include his daughters, ...
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Barrow County students scored higher than the state averages in nearly every category of testing at the elementary school levels for 2017.
Georgia Milestones test results were released last week and school administrators presented a report Tuesday night.
County students scored below the state average on five of eight high school courses tested, but the county’s students improved over the 2016 scores in five of the eight.
At the elementary and middle school levels, Barrow students improved their scores at six of eight schools in the third grade; five of eight in the fifth grade and three of four in the eighth-grade.
The results are more mixed for the end-of-course high school results.
The district was below the state averages for ninth-grade literature, American literature, algebra I, geometry and U.S. history.
It had scores above state averages for biology, physical science and economics.
The district also had lower results for 2017 than 2016 in algebra, biology and U.S. history.
See the full story in the July 26 issue of the Barrow News-Journal.

Former Winder-Barrow High School football standout and Georgia State senior cornerback Chandon Sullivan was named last week to the preseason All-Sun Belt Conference first team. Sullivan is the top returnee on a Panther defense that finished sixth in the FBS in pass efficiency defense and eighth in passing yards allowed (173.9) in 2016, when ...
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Bethlehem Christian Academy ushered in the official beginning of GISA football practice bright and early Monday morning, launching into a rigorous two-week period before its preseason scrimmage Aug. 4. The Knights have been practicing since July 11, but weren’t allowed to go in full pads until Monday. BCA coach Lance Fendley made sure his ...
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